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Phoebe Palmer's Hand in Methodist Missions

Dan Graves, MSL

American Methodist missions to China were created largely through the
influence and prompting of one extraordinary woman. Phoebe Palmer is
best known in our day as the writer of revival hymns such as this on
Christ's blood:

The cleansing stream I see, I see! I plunge, and oh,
it cleanseth me; Oh, praise the Lord, it cleanseth me, yes,
cleanseth me.

A Methodist lay person, she worked tirelessly for social change and
improvement and was a key influence in 19th century Methodist revival.
She also was the driving force behind funding the first Methodist
missionaries to China. She had considered going to China herself, but
decided she was needed more where she was. But she and her husband
pledged the first $1,000 and stimulated others to raise similar
amounts.

Methodists were not the first to send missionaries to China. Many
other missions had preceded them, including Hudson Taylor who founded
the China Inland Mission. The first American Methodist missionaries to
China, Moses White, Robert Maclay and Henry Hickok, supported by the
direct efforts of Phoebe Palmer and her husband, reached Fuchau in the
land of Confucius on this day, September 4,
1847.

Fuchau was a city of over 600,000 souls. Yet for a long time no one
turned to Christ, although the people were friendly enough. Despite a
healthy location, illness dogged the missionaries. At times their
efforts seemed fruitless. Seven years after arriving, they had seen no
evidence that a single soul had converted. It was three more years
before they baptized their first convert, Ting Ang, on July 7, 1857. By
1867 only a minute fraction of Fuchau's population, a mere 450 people,
had become Christians. It was enough to fill a single church.

A phenomenon of our time is the explosive growth of the Chinese
church. This did not come about by accident. One of the principles of
"chaos" mathematics is the snowball effect. A tiny change
today can build to an enormous effect later. The seemingly insignificant
work of the Methodists in Fuchau was one of many streams which
contributed to today's resilient and faithful Chinese church.

Such tiny beginnings suggest the timeless power of individual acts of
goodness. Phoebe Palmer was a prominent face in that concourse of
Christian effort.

Bibliography:

Gross, Ernie. This Day in Religion. New York, N.Y. :
Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1990.